bits and pieces.

Archive for the 'Web Design' Category

Paint Shop Pro 7 and 8 do a very poor job of creating rounded corners if you create a rounded rectangle. It has frustrated me to no end. Ironically PSP 6 made perfectly fine rounded corners. What gives? Fortunately I found this tip: how to round corners (it is a ways down in the tips). […]

Paint Shop Pro 7 and 8 do a very poor job of creating rounded corners if you create a rounded rectangle. It has frustrated me to no end. Ironically PSP 6 made perfectly fine rounded corners. What gives? Fortunately I found this tip: how to round corners (it is a ways down in the tips). […]

I’m always on the lookout for new ways to tweak CSS for design purposes. The more you can rely on CSS to drive layout, versus images, tables, etc. the faster your site is going to load and the more you’ll distinguish your site from others. Mandarin Design is one such site that is pushing the […]

Google has a calculator built into it’s search engine. I never knew that. If you type “meters in mile” for example, it will give you the answer. You can also type typical math problems such as (2*4)+9 and the answer will appear. You can also ask it to return definitions. Type “define: google” for example, […]

This is a very neat on-line utility for splitting images. It will build the mouseovers even. It will only work with proportional images needing splitting, but if you only do one every once in a while it might work well for you.

I am considering adding Mike Davidson to my personal list of web/html heros. He has something called sIFR (flash replacement of text so a nicer anti-aliased font can be used). Or as he puts it: Introducing sIFR, The Healthy Alternative to Browser Text. I think I will try playing with this. If I understand it […]

Google has done it again, come up with something for free that will make your life easier, and finding what you lost possible. How often do you have to look all over your computer for something? Cannot remember where you left it etc. Google now offers a 400k download that will index your hard drive […]

I love Google. At the bottom of a recent Google search up pops a promo for Picasa. It said: You can find any image you want on the Web. How about on your own computer? Albums. Editing. Printing. Sharing. Try Picasa, Google’s new photo organizer. Free Download! Now I have to tell you, it looked […]

The world has millions of sight impaired people, Australia has at least 300,000, and other countries have an order of magnitude more. Should they be discriminated against by web designers? Most countries have laws that give an emphatic NO! In fact, there have been court cases where companies have been sued for not providing for […]

css Zen Garden: A Comic Twist is to date one of the coolest implementations of the Zen Garden project. The project is simple: take one html page and separate the design from the content. There are thus hundreds and hundreds of designs for this one web page, all enacted simply by switching up the stylesheet.

See the Color Change in the top right corner. I really like the simplicity of this. It is just lines like this: <span style=”background: #eeeeee; border: 2px solid #006699″> <a href=”#” onclick=”setActiveStyleSheet(‘default’)” title=”default” style=”text-decoration: none;”>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</a> </span> and then this javascript kicks in to manage the change: http://www.deanesmay.com/styleswitcher.js

Now this looks like a nice utility! The The Regex Coach will help you see the effect of a proposed regex (Regular Expression) match using a perl compatible engine. I am going to give this a try. What do you use for this purpose? Leave a comment on what you use. I have always struggled […]

Excellent introductory css course called: CSS 101: Cascading Style Sheet Beginner’s Course. Ever notice that out of the millions of pages on the web you wind up at a handful over and over? This is one worth some time.

We sometimes lament the fact that we just don’t seem to have that “magic” that makes a site look good and clean. We often wonder is it an inate talent? Is it something that can be learned? How do you get better at it? This site explains a redesign: Maki. I wonder what I can […]

www.imagetweak.net is a nice little on-line utility you can use to change your images, reduce size, rotate, etc. It seemed to work very well in my tests. It was written by a friend of a prior student of mine, but I resisted any impulse to check out the html coding :-)

I came across this nifty little DHTML Slide In Menu on another site and decided I liked it enough to track it down. It looked a lot better to me on the site where I found it. What I don’t like is how it acts/reacts when you scroll down as it bounces.

Some of the cooler looking sites sometimes use transparent layers/div’s to achieve the look. One method to get a transparent background is to use a png image with partial tranparency (see a discussion of that here). Unfortunately, Internet Explorer doesn’t much like png’s unless you go a bit to make them work. You can also […]

How many times did someone send you a word document complete with numbered paragraphs and ask you to convert to (x)html? It happens to me all the time. Next time I am going to try this on-line as it worked very well on a demo. Daring Fireball: Markdown Web Dingus. You can also get a […]

I have been working on understanding CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) better as they appear to be where it is at for good web design. I really enjoy looking around the Zen Garden Project and the Word Press CSS Contest. These are awesome examples of style separated from content. One of the things that tended to […]

Independent Testers.org – Home Page is a site that will have various volunteers look through a site on different browsers and provide a report back. Interesting concept as long as the volunteers don’t mind the grind :-)

I often am looking at something on my computer and think, now that is a nice color … what is it. In the past I most often look either at the coding (if it is CSS for example) or save the image locally and then look using my photo/image editing software. So today I said […]

I have posted a new “tutorial” although it is really just an accumulations of findings I had in trying to solve the broken box model in Internet Explorer 5. This results in problems for css layout sites when viewed in IE5 unless some adjustment is made. In this article, The Box Model Hack and other […]

An excellent article on how to use Google’s Search Engine for good and evil: The perils of Googling. It both points out how you should carefully think through what you do in your day to expose data/information, and suggests many helpful ways to use Google to find exactly what you are looking for. Certainly worth […]

No JavaScript, no images, no tables! Simple clean Cascading Style Sheet solution to rollover text buttons. The idea and much of the coding for this one came from the notetab.com yahoo html group. It has been tested in current Internet Explorer/FireFox/Mozilla browsers with success. Demonstration page showing simple text buttons with highlight on rollover. The […]

I frames are starting to make some interesting site designs possible. The other day we came accross this one which uses a combination of iframes and javascript: Cantalope Music. Click on a link in the left iframe and it will load content in the right iframe and show a different image to the left. When […]

One of the hardest things for those of us with limited color skills (or is it artistic skills?) is to get a nice set of colors for a site. We have many places we look when we want to find coordinating colors for example. However, one that I really like is this one that allows […]

If we know one thing for sure it is this: Web Design is not static. Things that were amazing five years ago, or three minutes ago, may not be so amazing any more. The web is the classic open forum where each participant can seek his/her/their own level of sophistication. Often things are collaborative, much […]

This site will tell you what happened on a particular date in history, which may add interesting content to a web site. How much was a gallon of milk, gas, etc. Who was born, what were the headlines? Enter Date (MM/DD/YYYY) (Be sure to enter slashes in the date. For example: 07/20/1969) This can […]

I sometimes have documents submitted to me with a request to make them into pdf (portable document format) files so that they will display in Adobes free Acrobat Reader program. I have never had enough demand for this to justify buying the full blown Acrobat program. In the past I often use Corel WordPerfect (because […]